


A Circle of Stones

by Pyre_Prism



Category: Creepypasta - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Journal Entries, Original Characters - Freeform, no 'canon' creepypastas, trippy storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 18:03:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17391083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyre_Prism/pseuds/Pyre_Prism
Summary: Another creepypasta story focused on Robin, dealing with his origins.--Seeking answers for a college assignment, Sarah travels to an old farm with an unusual history.





	A Circle of Stones

The farmhouse stood as silent as it had for over a hundred years, its walls crawling with vines, every crack and crevice overflowing with moss and trapped leaves. No traces of the ever-expanding town came near the farmstead, almost as if afraid to breach the property line. All around the house, tangles of all manner of plants grew tall and wild, hiding fallen branches and rocks in a blanket of yellow and green.

Sarah’s car had already cooled by the time that she started to slowly pick her way to the front door, a crumpled map in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Hazel eyes stared up at the two-storey building, studying the structure as if it would tell her the secrets of the universe –or at least, the secrets of what she was looking for.

“The Goodfellow farm should be this one… There aren’t any other farmhouses close to town that aren’t, well, this…” she muttered to herself, peering at the map one last time before she folded it back up and stuffed it into a side pocket on her backpack.

Her careful approach had finally brought her all the way to the door, and she inspected the old wooden barrier. The wood was rotten, waterlogged from at least a century of English weather, and hadn’t even been barricaded or locked from the outside. She grinned to herself and pushed at it, letting out a snicker as it shifted just enough to assure her that there wasn’t anything on the other side, either. A series of powerful shoves later, and it had scraped open enough for her to step inside.

Immediately, the smell of mould and mildew hit her nostrils, and she pulled a handkerchief out of her jeans pocket, slamming it quickly over her nose and mouth with her free hand before she could retch more than a few times –there was no way she wanted to lose her meagre breakfast. After a moment of consideration, she bent to set the crowbar on the floor and tied the handkerchief around her face, then grabbed the iron tool back up again. Satisfied, Sarah reached behind her for a flashlight, clicking it on and using the beam to get a better look at the room she was in.

While the smell had been expected and even a little disappointing, the interior seemed to actually be in fairly good condition… perhaps a little too good. Not for the first time since leaving home, Sarah found herself debating whether getting a decent mark on her criminology paper was worth investigating such an old building.

The history of the farmstead was almost completely buried in superstition and local folklore, but the disappearances of the family that last inhabited it was a fact… What she wanted to find out was who they were, to begin with. No-one in the town, even those with families going back to the time of that event, seemed to know –or if they did, they had no intention of telling her…

She shook her head to clear it, and focused her attention back on the here-and-now. “First floor first, then I’ll think about trying the stairs…”

The bottom floor was comprised primarily of a barren living area, a dilapidated kitchen, an empty basement, and what had probably once been servants’ quarters, considering the time period she was stepping through the remains of. Unsurprisingly, her search yielded nothing of interest, although she did wonder whether or not the house had been scavenged through at some point, to explain how empty it felt. With nowhere else to search on that floor of the actual farmhouse, she returned to the stairs in the entrance area, shining her torch beam up them and forcing herself not to envision getting halfway up and then falling back down to the ground.

“Nothing’s creaked or groaned since you got in, so stop being a baby. This is for your career!” Taking a deep breath in an attempt to steady her nerves, Sarah ascended the surprisingly-stable staircase as quickly as she dared, and was instantly met with more than she’d bargained for…

The walls, which were obviously supposed to be a sort of white or creamy colour, had been splattered with something that looked to be a dull maroon –there was barely anywhere that hadn’t been covered in splashes of the substance, and the more she stared at it the more she became certain that the liquid responsible for such stains was blood… ancient and dried, but blood nonetheless.

Her heartrate picked up, and her face felt torn between grinning and grimacing. Something had happened, that much was clear, and she felt closer to the answers than ever before.

Most of the doors on the upper floor were caved-in, splintered and broken as if something had been rammed into each of them. Each of these, she gave up on entering for the time being –unease had started to rear its ugly head the longer she spent on the second floor, as if she was expressly unwelcome in the old building. In fact, there was only one door that looked remotely promising to her, all the way down the hallway, right next to the only portion of the walls that wasn’t completely covered in the old blood.

Sarah slipped through the last door, noting the splintering of the wood in the vicinity of the missing handle with a slight frown. The room itself looked like it had once been some sort of study or library; or rather, that was the only idea that came to mind when she looked at the shelves built into the far wall, each shelf bearing at least ten rotten volumes, coupled with an old writing desk by the grimy window.

“Well, this is something, at least…” she murmured, using the hooked end of her crowbar to open the top flap of the desk, then propped the other end of the tool against the bottom of the storage space underneath. With her now-freed hand, she carefully picked up the only thing hidden there; the leather-bound book was in shockingly-good condition, with barely any signs of damage from its age or how it had been stored for who knew how many years. Sarah shrugged one of the shoulder straps of her backpack off, opened the main pocket, and slid her find into the bag. With that done, she retraced her steps down the hall, down the stairs, and out of the entire house.

A wave of exhaustion hit her suddenly, and she sat down on what had once been a front porch, tugging off the handkerchief and setting her backpack beside her with as much care as she could. The flashlight was turned off and returned to its place hooked to her belt, the crowbar was laid across her lap, and she dug into the back pocket of her bag for a bottle of water and a muesli bar. With a quick refuel taken care of, Sarah pulled out the book she’d found.

Her hands caressed the leather as if the book was actually wet tissue paper instead, and she squinted, trying to read the embossed text on the cover. With a quick motion, she brushed a stray lock of black hair behind her ear, before cautiously unlatching the buckle holding the book shut. “Time to find out something about the family, I hope.”

To her delight, Sarah had found a journal, penned in scratchy text that was surprisingly legible. As she scanned through the entries, however, her excitement started to turn into dread… She flipped back to the start and began to read them thoroughly.

**~*~**

The family was a small one, with the husband having inherited the farm from his father, and his father before him, and his father before him… He married a local girl, and together, they had a single son. They were strict parents, perhaps a little more than usual for the time and the place, but the father truly believed that that was the lifestyle which would serve their child the best.

Unfortunately, their son was a flighty boy, always with his head off in the clouds and never on the work that he needed to do. This problem grew, like a tainted seed, despite their best efforts.

They kept him on the farm, they made certain that he understood the value of hard work and that he paid the proper deference to his parents. The children of the other families around the town never showed their faces on their farm, and in fact, if their son had been the only child in the entire country, it wouldn’t have made any difference to him.

On their large and lonely farm, there was never time to waste on frivolous things, what with only the three of them and an entire farm to tend. The father, the mother, and the son; all of them up and working from before the break of dawn until far beyond the setting of the sun, every day without fail. The toys he had were the tools he used, but if he dared to use them incorrectly… his father was duty-bound to teach him the error of his ways.

In many respects, it truly was a good thing that the father had married a woman with a witch’s touch, for that dark and twisted knowledge had kept their boy from suffering longer than was truly necessary, each and every time that he dared to step out of line. The fact that she was able to soothe the boy’s pain in such an unholy way… well, it was the secret that belonged to the family, and no-one else.

Their son remained flighty, but instead of growing staid and respectable, he grew vicious and even more unruly than they had ever expected. His father was forced to discipline him more and more, with greater intensity… His mother began to share her darker skills with her husband, all in the hopes of taming their wayward son. The boy, however, fought against these teachings… he fought and fought and fought.

And so, his father, after long debates with both himself and his wife, fought back.

The punishments that the child had endured in the past were repeated, but with a new element…

In the barn, behind the farmhouse, there was an underground room. Usually, it was meant for storing feed for the livestock, but the boy’s parents converted a part of it into the boy’s new bedroom. They left him locked in there for days after his mother had seen it fit to ease his pain slightly, in the middle of winter…

**~*~**

Sarah slapped the journal shut, holding one hand over her mouth, eyes wide and heart pounding. The journal was written by the father of the small family, and the man’s words made her stomach churn and her gut twist further with each passing second. She could almost hear the man, speaking directly to her, with absolutely no care in his tone for what he did to his own son.

“I know this was written ages ago, but that just sounds sick…” she groaned, reaching for her water bottle before reconsidering and putting it back into her bag. “Well, I wanted to know what the family was like… I guess I got what I wanted. Kinda… sorta… not really…”

Steeling herself, she opened the book again, resuming from where she left off.

**~*~**

Once freed from the dark confines of his new living quarters, the boy had tearfully latched onto his parents as if he was a mere infant once more. He had become desperate to avoid being returned to the barn’s underground store, leaping at the chance to obey every request and demand made of him. No more did he ask for breaks during a gruelling day of work, no more did he ask to see other children… no more did he ask for anything.

This peace, however, could never last… not when the boy had the tenacity of a fox and the wits of a raven.

Slowly, he began to challenge his parents again. His mother, his poor sweet witch of a mother, started to cave to the boy’s strengthening will… his father did not.

His father pulled the child aside, one night, taking him into the barn with his wife following silently behind them. The boy struggled and cried and begged, but these pleas fell on deaf ears; the child needed to learn his place in the world, and if that meant carving it into his small body so that he could never forget… then so be it.

It was only thanks to his mother’s dark knowledge that the boy lived to see the next sunrise.

They began to keep him in the barn’s underground storeroom whenever he wasn’t working. His father wanted to leave him in there for another stretch of several days, without any contact with either parent, but his mother persuaded her husband that doing so might invite more darkness into their son’s heart. This continued for months… and they began to notice a change in the child, but it wasn’t the one they wanted.

The boy was always tired, yet seemed to dream while he was awake, speaking to and interacting with creatures that weren’t visible to his parents… The dark now terrified him, to such a degree that the boy froze just outside of any shadows, or merely skirted around them in any way that he possibly could… and he became as wild as a raving beast once night fell.

His father believed that his son had become tainted, even more so than the taint that he had carried since his birth –plainly visible every time that they looked into the boy’s mismatched eyes– and wanted to ask the town’s most devoted priest to inspect the child… His wife was hesitant but eventually agreed, and it was while the two of them went to seek holy intervention that their son was lost to the darkness they had locked him within.

**~*~**

The journal ended with the hastily-scrawled line ‘that thing is not my son’, coupled with another splatter of red-brown –this time a shade closer to the colour expected of dried blood. Sarah felt her entire body shaking with a toxic cocktail of emotions that she couldn’t even clearly identify. Gulping back the rising burn of bile, she slid the book back into her bag. By all rights, she had all she needed… but that room under the barn simply begged for her to investigate.

She sighed, gathering her things and getting to her feet. The barn was behind the house… so that’s where she was headed next.

The trek to the other main structure that remained on the old farm didn’t take long, and she wasn’t as surprised as she thought she should have been when she saw that the double-doors she expected to be there… simply weren’t. She was glad to avoid breaking into the building, though, and made her way into the wide-open space.

Finding the trapdoor to the storeroom didn’t take very long, nor did opening it, thanks to what had probably been the lock to imprison that poor boy being flung off to one side. Sarah grabbed her flashlight, turning it back on, and descended the ladder-like steps.

She swung the beam around, light sweeping over every side of the room, including the ceiling and the floor. One half of the space looked more or less normal, albeit entirely empty of what it had once been used to store, while the other half had Sarah covering her mouth for the third time in an hour…

The splatters of red were almost expected by that point, but the freshness of the colour wasn’t.

“It’s like all that crap just happened…” she hissed, feeling her heartbeat beginning to speed up yet again. A sense of dizziness started to creep up on her, and she tried to force herself to take deep breaths; within minutes, though, her body fell to the dusty floor… completely unconscious.

**~*~**

When Sarah woke up, she was no longer in that makeshift torture chamber, but was instead in a wide field of flowers, surrounded by a ring of rocks that each looked to be around the same size as her fist. Blinking owlishly, she pushed herself to her feet, swaying a little before regaining her balance completely, and looked around. The air smelled sweet and fresh, the sun looked to be higher than she’d have expected… unless she was dreaming, which seemed more and more likely the longer she thought about it.

Deciding to get a better look at her surroundings, Sarah picked a random direction and started to walk. No longer than a few minutes later, she found herself standing beside a pool of water so still that it resembled a mirror rather than any kind of liquid she knew. She knelt down and reached out a finger to disturb the perfection of the pool’s stillness.

The moment that her finger touched the water, she let out a startled shout; an image had appeared on the pool’s surface, showing a scene that looked far too much like the storeroom for comfort. Another moment passed, and then the image rose up off of the pool and began to play as if she was watching an old movie…

In the scene, a small child sat with their knees up by their chest and arms wrapped tightly around their legs, a messy head of red curls buried in the bony limbs. His arms bore some of the most stomach-turning injuries that Sarah had ever seen, resembling words carved directly into the child’s tender flesh. The red splatters she’d seen for herself were even fresher than they’d been in reality…

A sliver of light appeared, widening rapidly and accompanied by the creaking of iron hinges. Instead of looking up, the child flinched and began to shake. A deep voice sounded, then, making Sarah’s insides clench with dread –it was exactly the same as the one that her mind had connected with the surprisingly-literate father.

“We’re goin’ t’town. You behave y’self, ya hear?”

A doglike whine was the only answer the child gave, but it seemed to be enough for the man, as he grunted and the light disappeared with an echoing slam.

The scene crackled, like static interference with an old television, before resuming. The child had lifted their head, showing a gaunt and terrified face. It had to be the son, Sarah realised in the same breath as she questioned how she was even dreaming something so vividly. Set on the boy’s face, in the midst of what looked to be dark shadowy bags, were a pair of bright eyes… one grey and one light brown.

She frowned, finally realising what the journal might have meant by ‘a visible taint’ on the boy… In a time where witches were still a concern, heterochromia was often met with intense superstition.

Returning her attention to the scene, she saw a ring of glowing orbs materialise in the storeroom. The boy’s stare was locked on the phenomenon, and he watched the orbs turn into… rocks. Like the ones that Sarah had woken up to in this dream. Slowly, the light from the stones faded, and another glow began to appear in the centre of the ring; a humanoid shape that started as the size of a regular action figure but then grew until it was the same size as the boy.

The figure’s head dipped to one side, apparently studying the child for a moment before nodding rapidly and holding out a hand towards him, gesturing for him to come closer, a palpable air of urgency filling the area when the boy didn’t move a muscle.

“I can’t…” the boy whimpered, shaking his head. There was a tense pause before the strange figure repeated its gestures, using both hands instead of just the one. “Y’don’ get it! I wanna, but… No, I don’ wanna stay, don’ be stupi—…” He trailed off, curling back into himself. “…I think they wanna kill me…”

At that, the figure’s shape seemed to glitch for a moment, before it stepped out of the ring. As if it had passed some kind of barrier, the instant a part of it exited the ring, its glowing featureless form was replaced with a beautiful yet naked young girl… coloured from head to toe in pastel colours not found in humans. Her face was set in a pained and fearful grimace, and she crouched in front of the boy, wrapping her arms around him. Sarah could see her mouth moving, but the floating scene didn’t seem able to relay what the girl said.

The boy froze when the girl embraced him, pulling away after she spoke. “Wha’s that s’posed ta mean?! I ain’ givin’ up…!”

She also pulled away, letting go of him and turning back to the stone circle; Sarah saw her face twist into a frightful and greedy visage for a split second before the girl’s mouth started moving again.

“…A castle…? Y’mean it…? No more bloody chores…?” the boy’s voice turned wistful, and he slowly uncurled his thin limbs enough to stand, despite the pain it seemed to cause him. “An’ all I gotta do is go with ya an’ learn from someone?” Another unheard statement from the girl, and his freckled face paled slightly. “King?!”

Sarah’s mouth fell open, wondering why her dream had taken such a strange turn. She watched the girl laugh and turn back to the boy, holding out her hands for him to take and nodding her head at the circle. She watched the boy’s gaze switch between the girl’s pastel face, the ring of stones, and the closed trapdoor… and all at once, she knew what the boy’s decision would be.

“…I can’ jus’ leave ‘em t’do this to someone else… What if I get a li’l brother or sister…? I can’ let ‘em… I won’ let ‘em…”

The girl paused, tilting her head and crossing her eyes, then she nodded vigorously with a face-splitting grin. Her hands began to glow brightly and she put them on his chest; the glow brightened even further and spread, engulfing his entire body. A scream tore from the boy’s throat, making Sarah jump and inch further away from the edge of the pool. The heart-wrenching sound continued for what felt like hours, but eventually faded at the same time that the glowing light did, revealing the boy’s body to be floating slightly…

A confused frown tugged at Sarah’s lips. The boy looked different… the bright red of his hair had intensified beyond what a human could possess without dyes and his ears –now long and pointed– peeked out from behind the unruly strands, his eyes now gleamed silver and gold and appeared to be lit with an internal light… and the carvings that his father had made on his arms had been gouged out, leaving behind horrific scars that trailed from his wrists to his elbows.

The boy took a few seconds to assess the changes wrought upon his body, before hugging the girl tightly and literally flying out of view –although a couple of resounding smashes hinted at what he’d gone to do.

Strangely, the scene didn’t dissipate like Sarah had expected it would…

Instead, the pastel-coloured girl turned to face what Sarah had subconsciously-dubbed ‘the camera’ and grinned widely, baring a set of sharklike teeth. Her mouth moved again, and this time an ethereal and musical voice reached her ears.

“So, now you know the story of our little Robin red-breast… Step back into the circle to return and forget, or touch the water to join us forever. The choice is yours, Sarah Goodfellow, but make it quickly… The king and queen of the Seelie Court have been waiting to meet the blood of their wayward toy.”

  



End file.
